Stand Out in the Crowd: Reason 5 of 10 Why Your Web site Doesn’t Rank

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RISMEDIA, July 9, 2007—This series of articles is a detailed list of key reasons Web sites fail to rank in search engine results. Our fifth segment in this series discusses how standing apart from the other agents results in search engine success.

“You have nothing original to say and the search engines don’t like the mediocre.” At the core of the reaching the top of search engines, this is perhaps the most basic and common sense point:

Every real estate professional wants to stand out. Every search engine is looking for the one who does.

However 90% of the industry makes the same mistake—almost every real estate site has identical home listings, verbatim paragraphs about the real estate market, and even visual appearances that look similar.

What search engines are currently desperate for is fresh, relevant, and unique content.
This is an unfortunate problem: many real estate professionals have access to enormous amounts of unique and fresh content in the form of local stories, personal viewpoints, and industry expertise. By stepping away from recycled white-paper materials and corporate marketing slogans, professionals have a chance to leverage their own personal wealth of intellectual property and professional branding information.

The various social media types: blogging, news sites, community forums, client feedback, video tours, and other forms of syndicated content provide search engines with exactly what they value most: fresh, relevant, and unique content. Personal and professional interaction between two individuals always creates unique conversations, and rather than hide that communication within e-mails you can utilize it as a promotional and educational tool for future prospects. Individual agents can find unique and effective content by addressing conversation with clients and the community at large, and brokerages and real estate firms have the ability to nourish agents into noteworthy highly effective online promoters for an office.

By providing unique content about the region or metro area, real estate professionals have the opportunity to create information that has never been seen before online. This data is invaluable to online marketing and is unfortunately thrown away on each and every transaction between a site and the visitors browsing its pages. Enabling social functions on a site enables individuals to share common viewpoints, detail exact points of interest, and create a site that is growing and evolving at an exponential rate.

Take a moment to review your current site and ask yourself what functionality it has that inspires fresh and relevant content. Double-check with your Webmaster to find out when your site was last updated and how many pages it has. If you were the search engine asking the same questions, you would be wondering why it wasn’t updated today.

About the author:
Barry Hurd is President of Social Media Systems, an online marketing and advertising consultant group working with search engine marketing and leveraging social media communities. He has over 15 years of entrepreneurial Internet and online marketing experience. As an author and prolific blogger, he has reached online audiences around the world. Since the mid nineties, Barry has been involved in numerous efforts to bring forth technical innovation through online business models. Past projects have included NIKE, REI, TMP Worldwide, Monster.com, Verizon Superpages, Intuit, and RIS Media.

For more information, visit www.socialmediasystems.com.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.

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